This is perhaps a slightly perverse offer, seeing as so many folks who have been jonesing for Into The Breach have the jitters and the sweats specifically because it’s the follow-up to the revered FTL.

However, if you’ve managed to come to this backwards, i.e. got all hot’n’bothered about Into The Breach’s ultra-deft, ultra-lean apocalyptic turn-based strategy without ever having played its brutal star-trekking predecessor FTL, good news! If you buy Into The Breach via Humble or GOG (and the former delivers you a Steam key, FYI), you’ll get a free copy of FTL.

(more…)

Look not to what high-speed, turn-based, sci-fi strategy wonder Into The Breach shares with its timeless predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, but instead to how aggressively different it is. Though they share a soul of permadeath and moment-to-moment dilemmas, entire limbs have been lopped off and casually thrown aside, teeth and hair uprooted and plugged back in at strange new angles, eyeballs moved to places that were never designed to have eyeballs. Not in merely superficial ways either. It has moved from space-bound chaos to ground-based decisions, from spaceship crew management to mech vs horror-bug warfare, even from real-time to turn-based combat.

Yet the really startling change is that, unlike FTL, Into The Breach is rarely a game of chance, of random, cruel loss or sudden fortune, but instead is almost pathologically fair, even if it often doesn’t feel like it. There is no calamity here that cannot be traced back to your own actions. In other words, you’ve only got yourself to blame for the total wipeout of humanity. But this particular end of the world is a glorious one, and one I will happily keep experiencing for years to come. (more…)

‘FTL but on a…’ is a formula that sounds like it can just keep on giving, but it’s entirely telling that the creators of FTL have moved onto whip-smart micro-turn-based strategy instead of more ship management-based roguelitery. People keep making these things – on a train! on a post-apocalyptic battlebus! also on a spaceship! also on a post-apocalyptic battlebus! – but I can count the real successes on one hand.

Sadly, it seems I won’t be grafting an extra finger with ‘Abandon Ship‘ carved into it onto that hand – not unless this Cthulhu vs pirates take on the vehicular surviv-o-RPG format can perform some serious course-correction during its voyage through early access.

(more…)

For the past couple of months, we’ve been bragging shamelessly about how we’ve already got beta copies of Into The Breach, the XCOM vs Pacific Rim vs Advance Wars-y follow-up to the timeless FTL: Faster Than Light. This ugly crowing has an expiration date, you’ll be glad to hear – and that date is the end of this very month. (more…)

Space games have experienced a rebirth over the past few years, particularly space sims, but as many in the comments pointed out, you don’t need to be sitting in a cockpit to enjoy the stars. This updated list broadens our search for the best space games on PC, throwing strategy games, roguelikes and at least one RPG into the mix.

Read on to see what the top picks are.

(more…)

It’s that time again already – 2018’s Independent Games Festival hands out its best-in-indie gongs on March 21 (as part of the Game Developers Conference), and these are the games in line for a prize. And, more importantly, a big shot at success thanks to the profile, although it should be noted that a fair few of these have done rather well for themselves already.

Scooping the most nods at 4 is veritable brain-frying, rule-rewriting puzzler Baba Is You, while the singular, surreal climbing game Getting Over It… With Bennett Foddy and charming, cups-on-ears narrative adventure Night In The Woods both boast a respectable three, followed by FTL follow-up Into The Breach with 2. There are many more lovely, lovely things on the full list of finalists below.

(more…)

With apologies about continued teasing you with something you can’t have quite yet, I wanted to follow-up our recent chat about the stressful wonders of FTL follow-up Into The Breach with an after-action report. This takes you through how the game actually works, and demonstrates the kinds of decisions, sacrifices and face-palming involved in every moment of it.

(more…)

Any studio with a debut as strong as FTL might well be wary of that Difficult Second Album syndrome. How do you follow up a game so idiosyncratic and widely adored without risking disappointment? The answer, it turns out, is with a kaiju vs giant mech tactical masterclass.

We ve been playing Into the Breach.

(more…)

Cowardice is a virtue. So says the team on this week’s RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. That’s because our theme is “running away” – games that encourage you to flee from danger, or that give you a choice between fight and> flight. Adam will run from the soldiers of Arma or the post-apocalyptic antagonists of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Brendan will scarper from poor odds in For Honor or Overwatch, while Alice only pretends> to run away in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, tricking her foes into giving chase before ambushing them like some kind of velociraptor. (more…)

Within a couple of minutes of sitting down with Justin Ma and a build of his new game, Into the Breach [official site], preconceptions are torn to shreds. Ma is one half of the team behind FTL and when Into the Breach was announced, I wasn t alone in thinking it looked like tactical skirmisher Advance Wars, with added monsters. It is that game, to an extent, but its most notable feature isn t tied to the setting at all – it s that this is a tactical combat game in which the enemy is entirely predictable. Everything is explained below, but in short, this might be the smartest turn-based design I’ve seen since Invisible, Inc.

… [visit site to read more]